


Embrace the Darkness

by FlyLittleMoth



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Ambiguous Deaths, Ambiguous Relationships, Blood and Injury, Crime Scenes, M/M, Minor Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter, it's will and hannibal for christ's sake
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-26
Updated: 2019-09-26
Packaged: 2020-10-28 12:44:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20778785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FlyLittleMoth/pseuds/FlyLittleMoth
Summary: As Jack looks over the video evidence of the Red Dragon's final stand, he comes to a realization about the dynamic of Will and Hannibal's relationship, and why they did what they did.





	Embrace the Darkness

**Author's Note:**

> I've had this one sitting around collecting dust in my unposted folder for literal years, and I need to get it out. Apologies if it's crap.

Xx

  
Will Graham was most likely dead by now. Hannibal Lecter was also considered to be most likely dead, while Francis Dolarhyde was definitely dead.

  
The Red Dragon's reign of bloodshed was over, but the two responsible for his downfall were gone. Dead or missing. No bodies other than Dolarhyde's were found, so they were hopeful that at least Will was alive, but the boys at Quantico weren't holding their breath about it. They'd issued a missing persons' report for the two of them, but it was unlikely that anything could come of it.

  
Jack Crawford sat in his desk chair, fiddling with the flash drive containing the footage recovered from the camera at the crime scene. He was sure they had to have been killed, though. If not by Dolarhyde, then quite possibly by one another.

  
When they'd tracked the police cruisers to the scene, they'd stumbled across a battlefield stained with a small ocean of blood, wine and broken glass. Dolarhyde's body lay in a pool of mostly his own blood, while there was much more spattered and smeared around the scene. Distinctly too much for one person to have excreted alone. They'd tested the numerous puddles and stains for DNA and found that the much of the blood coating the floor and walls of the house was an amalgamation of all three men, indicating that a great battle had occurred, but without anyone alive left to tell the story other than the camera.

  
Weapons used in the fight lay abandoned on the ground, gore-spattered and strewn about haphazardly. They attempted to lift fingerprints off of the area, but found too much blood smeared on some of the weapons to be useful in fingerprinting. That part seemed almost redundant anyway. They knew who had been there, what they had done, and the most vital piece of evidence had been brutally ripped open and left in a pool of his own blood on the ground outside.

  
Dolarhyde's stomach had been split open while a large gaping hole in his throat had seemingly been bitten out. The chunk of flesh torn from his neck lay near his feet, dried from the ocean air and crusting as they lifted it from the cement. He was littered in cuts and punctures, stab wounds and slashes aimed mostly at his legs.

Will and Hannibal sure did a number on him to get him like that, but not without their own injuries, as evidenced by their blood at the scene. It seemed Dolarhyde put up a hell of a fight.

  
Price had indicated the film from the old camera definitely did show what led him to lay in the blood spread like the wings of his namesake, Jack just needed to see it for himself. Price's face was grim, however, and it sparked a large pit of dread in Crawford's chest. So he ordered all other occupants of his office to leave as he plugged in the flash drive with shaking fingers and started the video programmed onto it.

  
He was met with a blur of colour as the camera slowly focussed, the outline of a figure stretched awkwardly backwards. The light ashy colour of the person's hair alerted Jack to the realization that it was Lecter. The blurriness subsided eventually and Jack had to take in the damage of the scene.

  
Jack stared at the pained and panting face of Lecter holding a bloody hand to his abdomen, laying propped against the leg of the piano in the cliffside retreat. Crawford had felt almost elated to see the man in such a state; vulnerable, injured and near defenceless. Like the last time they had fought in Italy. But this time he could tell it was a ruse. Lecter was never so obviously vulnerable; especially when injured. A manipulation to lower defences in slow, quiet preparation for the counter attack. Over the years and after several beatings against one another, Jack had learned the difference.

  
Since his escape from the armoured transport hours earlier, Hannibal had changed from his white prison jumpsuit into a more casual getup - dark grey pants and blazer over a lighter grey sweater, which showed the blood seeping from his gut wound. He gasped around some words that the old camera could not record the sound for, looking up imploringly to the left. That must have been towards Will, who was probably forced to stand passively as Dolarhyde set up the camera.

  
Or he was watching as Hannibal was suffering, Jack couldn't tell without seeing Will's face.

  
When Crawford's team had come across the scene, they'd found two broken wine glasses and a bottle smashed on the ground near a pool of Lecter's blood, the jacket Lecter was wearing with a bloody hole in the lower right back and a gun with a silencer attachment - the weapon that caused Hannibal's injury. They'd checked the magazine and found only one bullet missing, and the only prints they found on the grip were Dolarhyde's. Will's service pistol had also been found next to a small pool of Will's blood, unfired and forgotten.

  
Jack saw Hannibal flinch in the video, eyes turning to where Will stood with an expression of deliberately suppressed shock, as well as visible motes of rage with a miniscule snarl flashing across his features, his head following movement behind the camera leading to outside. Will must have either attacked the Dragon or had been attacked himself and dragged outside. Jack saw Lecter clench his teeth and close his eyes briefly, before pushing himself forward and towards the camera. He reached forward and gripped the device, and Jack lost sight of anything but the bloodied front of Hannibal's shirt.

  
The image shook almost violently, but still gave a clear shot of the wound in Hannibal's abdomen. Jack almost hissed in sympathy but caught himself.  
  


This was a monster.  
  


His pain was not significant, and had the plan gone through properly, Hannibal would not have suffered for long. He would have been put down following the Dragon with a quick bullet to the head, and all their problems would have been solved.

  
The image refocussed as Lecter placed the camera down, adjusting the lens quickly so that the viewer of the video could see the events in the courtyard. The focus was off, having been set for close range, so Hannibal set about refocussing it quickly. As he did so, Jack could see that Will was definitely being attacked by Dolarhyde, the right side of his face coated in blood and his white shirt painted dark down the front. He'd swung the small knife they'd found at the scene into the Dragon's leg, who responded by ripping it out with a silent roar and then jamming it into Will's shoulder.

  
The moonlight shone brightly overhead, giving a somewhat clear image, despite the fuzzy darkness of the shadows around them. Dolarhyde was difficult to make out, as he was dressed in black, but his pale skin showed starkly against the darkness. The light coming from inside also reflected off of Dolarhyde's jacket, giving a slightly better view of him, but he was still difficult to make out. 

  
It was then that Lecter re-joined the battle, having shed his blazer and giving Jack a clear view of his back. There was an identical bloodstain to his lower right abdomen as the one on his front, which indicated that it was a through-and-through bullet wound, normally a horrendously painful ordeal. But Hannibal moved now as though the injury did not trouble him, as if it did not register to the man at all, and that had Jack mystified.

  
_How anyone could even stand with a bullet wound that pierced all the way through their body was astounding. Perhaps he's running on adrenaline,_ Jack's brain supplied. _Perhaps he has a high pain tolerance? Either way, he's walking around unhindered by it._

  
Lecter stormed up and grappled the Dragon away from Will, giving the other man time to recover as Dolarhyde turned his fury towards the doctor. In that moment, Will and Hannibal worked in tandem; overpowering the beast with calculated slashes to the man's legs, Will with a knife and Hannibal with the small hatchet found outside. The Dragon staggered between them, and Jack could see Will's face properly for the first time in the video. He was sure to have nightmares for a long time.

  
Will looked feral.

  
Savage even. 

  
With blood coating half his face and the front of his shirt lost to dark stains, Will looked monstrous. Was this the thing that Dr Lecter had been molding all this time? Or was this what Will had been all along? The thing that crawled under the surface and pretended to be the Will Graham that Jack knew. Perhaps Jack hadn't known Will at all, and the version of him that he had become acquainted with was merely a ruse, a façade. Perhaps Hannibal had given Will the opportunity to remove the mask and reveal the creature within, his manufactured equal.

  
Crawford had realised long ago that they were bad for one another - Lecter had awoken something in Will that nobody else in the world could have anticipated. A monster. A killer. And together they'd established a dangerous interconnective dependency all those years ago that neither could break, despite the distance of miles and time between them these past few years, as well as all of the mutual murder attempts against one another. They were as bad as each other now.

  
In the video, Will's teeth flashed in a feral snarl as Lecter leapt onto the Dragon's back, pulling the man's head back. As Dolarhyde flailed to remove the doctor from his body, Will ran up to the both of them. This was the work of two like-minded killers, able to read the situation as one and decide who is going where. No words were spoken, no gestures made - the two had already decided and worked in unison without needing any communication whatsoever. It's what made the scene more brutal than perhaps they intended.

  
Jack had to bite his fist. He'd seen men die before. He'd seen corpses mutilated and people tortured, but this...

  
This was something else.

  
At the exact same time, Will, with bared teeth in a brutal snarl, slammed the knife into the Dragon's gut and dragged it across as Hannibal yanked the man's head back and sunk his teeth into his neck, tearing a chunk of meat out of his throat and falling backward off of the doomed man. Jack had already surmised the neck bite was Lecter.

  
Who else would know exactly where to bite on the neck to be lethal? Who else would dare try? Will wouldn't know, and Jack doubted he'd be inclined to do something so hideous either.

  
They both fell away from him, and Jack almost gagged as he saw Hannibal spit out a hunk of flesh and a mouthful of blood on the ground, the lower half of his face, neck and the entire front of his own shirt blackened with arterial spray from the dying Dolarhyde. Both men looked unholy, a mirror of one another, bodies dark with blood - both their own and Dolarhyde's - mouths ringed with the liquid and the fronts of their torsos painted black in the moonlight. They stood by as they watched the man between them exsanguinate, panting and damaged themselves.

  
Jack could see the liquid gushing out of the Dragon's neck and abdomen as he fell to his knees, raining out of his torso in a waterfall of gore, then he collapsed to his back as the substance pooled around him in a macabre shape reminiscent of the wings of his preferred namesake. The whole scene seemed to pause, the two men left standing in this battle looking over their slain enemy before they moved.

  
_So they survived the Red Dragon,_ Jack thought with a sigh, _but did they survive one another?_ That was the real question.

  
The two stumbled towards each other, panting and exhausted, before Will fell to his knees and held out his arm in front of him. He seemed to be struggling with his injuries, as he extended his hand to Lecter, who slowly made his way over to grasp it. He gently pulled Will to his feet, and Jack's breath caught in his throat. Will clutched onto Hannibal as though they were drowning, as though all their past animosity had been a bad dream, and Hannibal leaned in close and spoke something to Will, who smiled shakily and said something back.

  
Jack always knew there was something between them. Something unspoken. Something raw. A thing he'd purposefully ignored all this time.

  
'Part of me will always want to run away with him,' Will had said, and at first Jack thought it was part of the coercive and manipulative nature of Lecter to instil that kind of want in Will, but he could see now that it had been there all along. It just hadn't had enough time to cultivate and grow. Or Will had denied it of himself and buried it. With the previous hostilities between them, it definitely wouldn't surprise him if that's just what Will did.

  
He watched the two men embrace, Will's arms coiling around Hannibal's body like vines, one for his shoulder and one for his waist, and Lecter just letting it happen. His own hands were at first clutching fairly weakly at Will's shirt, as Will pressed his forehead to Lecter's shoulder. Lecter moved his head in a way that could almost be deemed 'affectionate nuzzling' by someone who didn't know him. Jack thought in some other life, they would have been lovers. If Hannibal and Will had not been so mutually destructive, had Hannibal not been a serial killer and Will not been so damaged, they would have gravitated towards one another.

  
Jack watched slack-jawed as Will's arms tightened, leaning their bodies towards the cliff and twisting them slightly, so that Hannibal was back-first to the precipice. Then, as though in slow motion, their bodies tipped and the last thing Jack saw of them were the bottom of their shoes. All that Jack was left with was the image of the horizon over the courtyard for several minutes, until the film ended.

  
"Oh my God."

  
He rewound the video, watching the lead up and the action of the fall with wide eyes. He had seen it, but didn't want to believe.

  
Will killed them both.

  
And Hannibal had let him.

  
He saw the expression on Hannibal's bloody face as Will shifted them closer to the edge. The quiet, tired resignation; the slack posture, as if he knew what Will intended all along; the arm trapped under Will's around his waist clutching gently onto the white shirt. Will was not going to let go, and Hannibal was accepting of it.

  
_But... they couldn't be dead_, Jack argued with himself. _There aren't any bodies._

  
He thought about it, as he rewatched their fall, and realised that this was what they'd both intended. Even if they hadn't been so injured in the fight, Hannibal was not going to be caught again, and Will was not going to go anywhere without him. They'd fostered a lethal co-dependency with one another - one that had never been extinguished despite trying to kill one another more than once, and despite Will's attempt to start a family without Lecter - a bond rekindled as they worked together once again, preferring death over a final separation.

  
Hannibal likely knew about the assassination plot against him, that either way out of this situation, he was going to die. Perhaps Will had decided that he couldn't go back, that Hannibal had changed enough of him that there was no reverse action, no returning to family the same as before, no pretending there would be a normal life. There was no such thing as a normal life for either of them, they had changed that for each other the day they met.   
Jack could only imagine that with their intertwined history and identically different mindsets, they'd thrown their lot in with the one person who understood either of them; one another.

  
Will was too damaged without Hannibal, and Hannibal was not alive without Will. Hannibal inspired the freedom of repressed self in Will, while Will inspired a deep-levelled emotional companionship in Hannibal. They were equal, their brilliant minds worked together seamlessly - despite certain homicidal urges - and they were an established effective team. It is what drew them to one another in the first place. Wherever Hannibal went, Will would follow and vice versa.

  
And in the end, they'd chosen the only path they had before them.

  
Plunging headfirst into the dark waves of madness together, after having stood on that precipice of denial for so long. Reconvergence in blood and gore sparking realization of self in both minds. The joining of flesh as they found the other and gripped tightly. Holding each other so close as they tipped over that cliff, that nothing could pry them apart ever again.

  
They'd chosen to die.

  
As one.

  
_And if they didn't die from the fall_, Jack thought, _they'd cease to exist - vanish in a way that records would never see them again in this lifetime. The blood on their hands cleansed with sea spray and their bodies healed with time. Forever searched for, never found. Poetic._

  
Just as Francis Dolarhyde faced his Becoming and transformed into the Great Red Dragon; the two beings of Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter converged and Became one as they fell into the darkness.

  
But until they found bodies, Jack would not be satisfied that they were gone for good. He pulled out his phone, calling whichever agent he came across on his contacts.

  
"I need the coast guard," He said in lieu of a greeting, eyes locked on video, examining the conjoined figure in the process of falling from the ledge. "We may have two bodies near the Red Dragon crime scene, I need a full sweep of the bay. It's imperative that any evidence on the location of the men involved in this case is brought forth immediately."  
  


Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter may be gone for now, but Jack at least wanted to find some final shred of them and say goodbye one last time.

Xx


End file.
